


sleep talking

by rensshi



Category: fromis_9 (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Childhood Friends, F/F, POV Alternating, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-11 20:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20552552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rensshi/pseuds/rensshi
Summary: “January’s ending,” Saerom says with a nervous smile, by way of an opening line.Of course, January is ending. There is the pit of Seoyeon’s heart that refills every time January ends. There is also the crushing gravity of the earth where it pulls her towards Saerom’s footprints meeting hers again.





	sleep talking

**Author's Note:**

> written for a neighbors prompt!
> 
> this is my first time writing fromis_9 so if you're reading this now thanks for giving this fic a chance!
> 
> and thank you to crackle for being my last minute beta

Time is relevant, especially for Seoyeon. She sleeps in until noon like she’s got some kind of hangover but springs to life when she’s changing out of her clothes and running out past Nagyung to catch the bus going to dance class; Seoyeon almost slept through her own surprise birthday party when Nagyung ran out for cake which was held by a still murderous Jisun when they paraded in. 

If she never had the party and let them in to swarm her, and sing (scream) happy birthday after Chaeyoung arrives, Saerom would have never dropped by, eyes wide and hair in disarray from the autumn wind. Admittedly, it would have looked bad if she hadn’t dropped by, since she and Seoyeon are neighbors with their units right across each other. She pushes Seoyeon’s birthday present into her hands, light, almost weightless. Seoyeon had gotten a basket of cookies from Kim Mingyu, who had been kind enough to drop by even if he had no reason to anymore. The cookies are gone by now, thanks to Chaeyoung and Nagyung. 

“What do you do again?” Jisun asked, her eyes flickering from Nagyung’s gochujang to soy sauce to sugar ratio, and back to Saerom, then back again warily at Nagyung squealing over the sugar. 

Saerom smiles, baring teeth like a fox, her eyes fanning pretty lines from the corners. Saerom studies business now, and Seoyeon isn’t all that surprised—they’d known each other for more than ten years, when Seoyeon was cycling around in training wheels trying to chase Saerom on her bike. She’d learned how to ride a bike later than the other kids, and Saerom was one of the few who stayed behind to walk next to Seoyeon cycling in wobbly lines.

Saerom laughs a little, quiet substance that echoes in Seoyeon’s head long after. “Am I still that predictable?” 

“No, of course not,” Seoyeon says too quickly, and Saerom’s face seems to shift, eyes glinting with a guarded hardness. There’s a loud yelp and the slap of a frozen packet hitting the ground. Seoyeon fidgets with the frayed rips in her jeans. Saerom just smiles.

Seoyeon learned a long time ago that Lee Saerom is not as put together as everyone thinks she looks. Saerom used to stitch wonky ugly patterns for her Barbie dolls and tried doing it for Seoyeon once, only to end up pricking herself in the finger. Saerom wailed about the tiny drops of blood she’s gotten on Seoyeon’s pretty white dress, not about the cut itself. Saerom was nine, and Seoyeon had only cried because Saerom cried.

It’s impressive how steady her gaze is now, boring into Seoyeon. A testament to the years spent apart when Seoyeon reached high school.

“January’s ending,” Saerom says with a nervous smile, by way of an opening line. 

Of course, January is ending. There is the pit of Seoyeon’s heart that refills every time January ends. There is also the crushing gravity of the earth where it pulls her towards Saerom’s footprints meeting hers again. 

  
  
  


January was Saerom and Seoyeon’s month. It used to be special because they’d celebrate it thrice: once on Saerom’s birthday on the seventh, a second time in the middle of the month in advance to the third celebration, which was Seoyeon’s birthday on the twenty second.

Saerom gave her more time instead of gifts. “If I kept getting you gifts, you’d be able to build a BMO shrine by now,” Saerom joked, cupcake with the unlit candle in her hands on Seoyeon’s sixteenth birthday. She’d baked the cupcake. Seoyeon told her it was bland, but she still ate the whole thing anyway before she ran upstairs to her room to get her skateboard so they could hang out outside and skate across the park. Her parents always disapproved of her owning it, but trusted her enough when Saerom was around.

“So that’s it then? You worshipped Lee Saerom when you were kids?” Chaeyoung asks, one side of her mouth quirked. 

Their professor comes in to start discussing their film analyses before Saerom can answer. She keeps her head on her arms, slumped over the table and so out of it but manages to reply, “Something like that.”

Chaeyoung stifles a snort and Seoyeon kicks the leg of her chair. Chaeyoung mutters _ah shit_, under her breath about her now ruined notes as she’s writing.

Seoyeon gives up focusing on what Professor Han is on about, off-tangent from how a couple of the guys in front are snickering about something that can’t be about _ The Double _. Meanwhile, the winter outside through the high windows of the lecture room crystallizes into something that feels a lot like recurrence. 

  
  
  


Saerom’s time is 5 am. In contrast to that, she was a sunset baby, born under a purple sky criss-crossed with telephone wires. At twenty two years old, she wakes up like clockwork when the sunlight touches this side of earth and begins to pepper through her white curtains. Or maybe she’s just a light sleeper. When Mingyu let himself in, the door lock beeping the funny little tune whenever he clambers over the threshold is enough to make her stir. Sometimes she still hears it in her dreams, and she wakes up to Gyuri’s light snoring across the room.

She closes her eyes when the spoon she’s stirring in her tea clinks too loud in the mug, her apartment walls still sleeping. Saerom misses him differently, although the ache is for herself, not for him.

_ Maybe you’re just getting used to new things, _Seoyeon said when she listened to Saerom hesitate outside the convenience store just around the corner of their flat. 

Seoyeon is not something new, but the gentle bow on her upper lip and the way she mixes different cereals together in her bowl for breakfast now are. Or Saerom just never noticed before.

Saerom doesn’t know how to articulate the feeling where this supposed new chapter feels like it’s an old one, that she’s marked and flipped back to over and over again somehow, a repeating action. If one peeks under the bandaid over her heart, it’s not broken all the way, the adhesive holding in place a huge chip and an ugly crack maybe. But not enough to warrant cardiac surgery. 

Saerom gets easily bothered when she doesn’t know how to put a name to things. 

  
  


“Unnie, you should get away from this place for a little while,” Seoyeon suggests, craning her neck to look at the car that honked at them from behind and tried to overtake. Saerom’s distressed version of mild road rage, disgruntled as she is this morning, made Seoyeon sink back into the passenger seat next to her.

“Where would I go?” Saerom asks, relaxing her grip on the wheel.

“Jecheon? Home?”

“Home isn’t even that far away,” Saerom says, laughing. Their childhood homes were only a thirty minute drive from the heart of the city, _ with _ traffic.

“So? That’s even better—you wouldn’t even have to be gone that long.” Seoyeon shrugs.

When Saerom was fourteen, she’d already wanted to get her driver’s license. By the time she was seventeen, her mom was letting her drive the car uphill to park into their driveway occasionally after a late night on the weekend. When she was old enough to finally get a license, it was a little anticlimactic. She didn’t feel as happy as seventeen-year-old her would have been. She drives her drunk friends home, prides herself on that duty and Gyuri says she’ll make it up to her by promising that she’ll finally get her license this year.

“Hey, Seoyeon-ah. Would you like to learn how to drive?” Saerom asks. She glances at Seoyeon’s questioning face before she smiles, keeps her hands on the steering wheel.

  
  


The reason they drifted apart by the time Seoyeon was in middle school and Saerom, a junior in high school, was simple. 

Saerom was ambitious, dipping her toes into every extracurricular that caught her interest. She’d stopped going to dance classes with Seoyeon when she fell into debate, and then she’d stuck it out with the music club with Hayoung. Who was also friends with Jang Gyuri, an absolute wonderful influence on Saerom when it came to her studies.

Seoyeon had long stopped going to hagwon and the dance classes too by then, but it made her miss Saerom coming over to show her new patterns she’s successfully stitched onto her own handkerchiefs (they did very well in Saerom’s short spinstress career—Seoyeon’s parents had gotten a gift box wrapped in cloth with clearly stitched script letters that said _Good Job _when Seoyeon won a dance competition in middle school). 

Seoyeon was still in middle school when she found out:

“Hey, you’re close with Saerom, right?” Kim Mingyu asks, his eyes far away and squinty under the searing sunlight.

Seoyeon, Saerom and Mingyu lived around the same area. They weren’t in the same neighborhood but it was never a chore for Saerom’s parents to drop Saerom off at Seoyeon’s street so they could walk to dance class together on the weekends, until that stopped. Seoyeon doesn’t know if that could count as close. Sometimes they’d see Mingyu with Saerom’s cousin and his friends hanging out near the convenience stores. Saerom’s cousin, Wonwoo, was always the nicest, quietest guy Seoyeon knew, a rarity among high school boys or so she’d thought. So by default, Seoyeon is inclined to like all of Wonwoo’s friends.

“Sort of,” Seoyeon said. “We were close when we were younger.”

“Oh.” Mingyu’s face turns slack like he doesn’t know what to do next, and neither does Seoyeon really, hands toying with the BMO keychain on her backpack and looking for Nagyung’s head among the rest of the kids filing out of school. She adjusts the notebook on her lap that she’d been doodling on, had slapped it shut when Mingyu’s gangly frame hovered in front of her.

“Since she always talked about you I kind of thought—well—I just wanted to give her this,” Mingyu blurts out, fishing out a neatly tucked envelope in a nice pastel color from his pocket. Unintimidating and innocent.

He doesn’t ask her to pass it to Saerom, and Seoyeon’s glad; Seoyeon’s grown up on enough Disney and fairytales to make her believe that it’d be more romantic if he does it himself.

And of course after the summer, Saerom was already hanging out with the cooler, smart kids in her year, like Kim Yugyeom and Bae Yubin. She held hands with Kim Mingyu after school. Hayoung, Gyuri and Saerom were practically inseparable, in their own bubble that Seoyeon didn’t want to burst. She still waved at Seoyeon on the occasion they saw each other at school, her fox grin and eyes lit up like stars everywhere she went.

By the time Saerom graduated high school, they’d lost contact with each other, and Seoyeon had thought that was that.

  
  


Saerom thinks she’s fairly receptive to new things. Which is why Hayoung could beg her to join her in a fitness routine that has dwindled down by now, considerably. But the yoga together was something she could still do, with Gyuri eating her fish cracker packets and Cheetos in the kitchen area loud and proud.

Seoyeon coming over to her unit, with Gyuri waving at her from behind Saerom at the door, is a pleasant new routine.

“It’s weird,” Seoyeon says, still looking around her place, eyes sweeping over the paraphernalia of stationery and colorful washi tapes littering the table in front of Gyuri.

“What’s weird?” Saerom asks, pouring store-bought milktea into glasses. 

“It’s like being in elementary school all over again. I thought you stopped sewing and stitching,” Seoyeon points out the toaster cover, really just cloth Saerom stitched to fit the body of the old toaster to hide how ugly the scratches in the metal were. “It’s so cute,” Seoyeon says, laughing.

Her croaky loud laugh breaks the stillness of the room, makes Gyuri laugh along with her too.

Seoyeon presses her lips together, tries to hold in her own laughter and fails. Some things just don’t change.

  
  


Saerom’s breakup with Mingyu when they’d reached their third year in college was a mutual one. At least, it felt mutual. It shouldn’t have been the easiest thing to do, but it happened, and neither of them could really look back.

She wakes up feeling empty until she doesn’t. She goes over her own Facebook and her Instagram over and over, thumb hovering on the delete option for each Mingyu-related post, until she grows tired of that too and leaves all their group photos with other people still up.

Saerom is okay with new things. She gets a call from Wonwoo two weeks after the breakup.

“Mom is going to invite you for a birthday dinner back in Incheon. I’m not sure if you can say no,” Saerom teases.

“I’m not _that _sorry I haven’t seen you and auntie since Chuseok last year. Besides, I’m only calling because I heard from Mingyu, the bastard,” Wonwoo says mechanically, without real conviction, and Saerom laughs. Mingyu isn’t even that much of a bastard, truly. But it’s honestly the first time she’s laughed so heartily in two weeks, so she lets Wonwoo have this one.

The seasons go on, and Saerom might think she’s alright with the new, but doesn’t like the occasional struggle when she’s trying to wrench in change and let old habits die.

She stares at the dot of blood on her finger from where she’s pricked it, and sighs. Runs her finger under cold water and rips the adhesive of a band-aid from her dusty first aid box.

  
  


Seoyeon is finding out that gripping the handlebars of a bike without training wheels with Saerom trailing behind her on foot feels different than stepping on a pedal. She’s inching a car backwards so it doesn’t knock into another tenant’s car on their street. She never had to worry about parking, so that’s different too. But strangely familiar, like a settled warm thing in the pit of her stomach she’s known all too well when she learns how to park Saerom’s Honda Civic.

Saerom has her hand on Seoyeon’s shoulder, her touch barely there and Seoyeon almost forgets that it’s there as guidance.

“Now when you get your driving lessons, you won’t be pressured. It’ll be a breeze for the practical,” Saerom says as Seoyeon’s clapping for herself in the driver’s seat, grinning ear to ear.

  
  


Saerom’s birthday back in Incheon feels like a quiet affair. Seoyeon accompanies her on the drive home, and accompanies her now as she’s walking around the old area where they used to weave their bikes around, snow crunching occasionally under their boots.

Saerom doesn’t like winter, but in January, it’s less cold when the warmth licks at her from the inside, glowing in soft embers. She’s just turned twenty three and the soft embers aren’t any dimmer. 

“Hey, there’s this word in English that I’ve been feeling a lot,” Saerom says to Seoyeon beside her. She’s trying to find the words to coalesce it into a language Seoyeon can understand.

“It’s like longing isn’t it?” Seoyeon asks, a crease furrowing her brows gently, eyes glossy. “But not really.”

Saerom isn’t sure.

Seoyeon nudges Saerom when she stays silent, her lips curled up and parted like she’s about to offer a joke with a piercing laugh. “You’re always so bothered when you can’t figure something out right away,” Seoyeon laughs, foregoing formalities when she’s three years younger. Scattered two o’clock sunlight fall on Seoyeon’s white sandals and Saerom’s black Nikes. They pass by the playground, the post office and the 7-Eleven on the corner of the street. Mingyu and Yugyeom used to sit around the benches with Wonwoo. The Barbie dolls in Saerom’s room are gone by now and her old child photos in frames stashed away so her mom could keep her room clean without too much of a hassle that way.

Saerom thinks nostalgia and longing being mutually exclusive is still weird. Seoyeon doesn’t think so.

Sometimes she finds it weird that she’s never noticed before how endearingly sleepy Seoyeon still looks when she’s happy.

She finds it weird that it’s what she thinks of when Seoyeon kisses her on the corner of her lips, breath sticky with the flavored beer Wonwoo had passed her during the family dinner after the cake.

Saerom can still feel the brush of her eyelashes when Seoyeon falls right asleep after that.

  
  


“So you never got over her huh?” Nagyung says, her voice hushed. She’s not patting Seoyeon’s arm sympathetically, which Seoyeon is thankful for. She wallows in her thoughts better that way.

Seoyeon’s not a wallower though. She just doesn’t know what to do this time.

“Yeah, I guess not,” Seoyeon agrees, toneless. This time Nagyung does pat her on the back. Seoyeon just groans into her pillow, and curls up under her comforter like that can make things right again.

  
  


Saerom’s always known Seoyeon’s been a romantic. She figured out Seoyeon’s tiny crush on Wonwoo when they were kids. She recognized the way Seoyeon cooed at her laptop screen when they were watching _10 Things I hate About You_. Seoyeon, the ever-loyal fan of Adventure Time, doodled Princess Bubblegum and Marceline together all the time. 

She tries to figure out a million ways to go about this, to tell Seoyeon it’s okay to want things.

“I haven’t seen Seoyeon since before you both left for Incheon,” Gyuri tells her. “Is she busy?”

Seoyeon being busy is _not _new. They may be neighbors, but it's honestly hard to catch her around the apartment area most of the time. She doesn’t wake up at the crack of dawn like Saerom does, and goes off doing a million different things before she runs off to a dance studio that she started going to diligently again, after falling in love with the forgotten hobby all over again. Seoyeon has her constants, as did Saerom.

Saerom folds the cloth in her hands over and over again, until she finally decides on what she’s going to stitch.

  
  


On Seoyeon’s birthday, she doesn’t particularly feel like unwrapping Saerom’s gift in front of her. But Saerom puts down her beer can, probably still full. She reaches for Seoyeon's hand, a gentle gesture, so Seoyeon opens the present.

The nicely wrapped package sets off a sharp pang in Seoyeon’s chest when she remembers the kind of washi tape Saerom always liked to use for wrapping gifts—a dark inky blue, covered with stars.

She half expects it to be a BMO item again, but her face heats up like a bonfire when she sees a pair of cartoonish hands linked, gray and pink, that she knows too well from drawing the characters repeatedly in middle school. They’re stitched intricately into a little pouch, complete with Saerom’s initials on the bottom corner of it.

“I’m good at dealing with new things,” Saerom says, her voice wavering but she holds Seoyeon’s gaze, eyes sharp and clear with an almost liquid quality to them. “Can we start over?” Her voice is steady this time.

Seoyeon’s okay with Saerom always knowing better, filling in the gaps for her and going about life taking leaps ahead. For a good part of her life, Seoyeon’s been okay with that. 

Only this time, it feels like Saerom’s asking her to look ahead with her.

Seoyeon’s chest shudders, when she lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding in. Gravity in her chest doesn’t feel so bad this time. “Of course. Thank you, unnie,” she says, and Saerom smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed this!


End file.
